Questions of how words are perceived by eye (and also by ear) will be addressed with information processing therory and methods. The research focuses on three major questions. First, what is the trade-off between phonologically-mediated access and visual access of lexical memory as a function of the writing system? The question is posed as a contrast of the phonologically precise Serbo-Croatian orthography with the much less phonologically precise English orthography. The experiments exploit the fact that the two alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic) used to transcribe the single Serbo-Croation language share approximately one-third of their letter shapes in common, some of which represent the same phoneme in the two alphabets and some of which represent different phonemes. Schooling introduces both alphabets at an early age, with Roman taught first in some areas, and Cyrillic first in other areas. Second what is the representation in lexical memory of the categories of the open class and the categories of the closed class of words and how might these categories relate in the normal course of reading? In contrast with English, the major grammatical device of Serbo-Croatian is inflection and the question is posed, in part, as a study of the dependence among inflected forms, those of declined nouns and adjectives and those of conjugated verbs. The dependence is measured through the use of the lexical decision task which will be extended byond its normal visual domain to audition, an extension facilitated by properties of the Serbo-Croatian language. The question is also posed, in part, as a study of the priming of a member of one category by a member of another, where the pair agree or disagree in case or in peson or in gender, and where the pair are or are not semantically compatible. The experiments will be conducted with both normal and agrammatic, i.e., aphasic, native speakers of Serbo-Croatian. Third, how is the acquisition of reading affected by the orthography in which the language is written? The question, posed in part as a comparison on common tasks between children learning to read Serbo-Croatian and children learning to read English, is directed at the pre-conditions for an analytic reading strategy and at the clain that the analytic strategy distinguishes the child who reads well from the child who reads poorly.